UncleBoots
Gold Member
- Joined
- May 27, 2020
- Messages
- 483
I am on to the diamond pasted balsa strops. Getting there was a bit more complex than I thought, and involved getting to know my finest-grit diamond/CBN stones better, which was one of my goals here.
The Venev, which is oddly labeled both as 2000 grit and 0-1 micron (The Shapton 16000 stone is labeled 0.92 microns, for comparison), polished like a 1 micron stone, but also left occasional rogue scratches. Whether those were due to some out-of-size particles, or merely particles that had broken out of the resin and stayed with the water on the stone and rolled around under the blade, I can't say. But either way, it wound up not being suitable.
The Nanohone 1 micron, which is an interesting soft matrix with holes in it, worked great. Any rocks breaking free of the matrix would have probably just fallen into one of those holes. So it polished the bevel up nicely, but if I raised my elbow enough to reach the bevel on the toe, those holes would make the illusion of stone flatness fall apart, and things would get caught. No.
What did the trick was a 15000 grit metallic bonded CBN stone. Metallic bond means stones aren't going to be breaking out of the bond, and the stone can be used without water, so no floating particles in a slurry. It's an Edge Pro-sized stone, 1"x6", so there wasn't much working room by the time you leave room for both my fingers and the honing guide on this large razor. But there was enough to get a some proper lines onto that problematic toe.
So I've moved on through the 0.5 micron diamond-pasted balsa strop, and the 0.25. Only the 0.1 remains. What things look like now is this:
The problematic toe, on the logo side of the razor.
No longer so problematic. I know there's still a band of shinier metal at the edge, and darker metal above that (speaking of the mircoscope picture; the darkness is just an artifact), but I know from observing the steps that the shiny part is 15000 grit CBN scratches, and the dark sliver is actually polish from the 0.25 micron pasted balsa strop. The edge feels, for the first time in the whole process, uniformly sharp along its whole length.
Other areas are more straightforwardly in good shape.
The toe on the other side.
A heel.
A middle area.
Tomorrow I expect to strop with the 0.1 micron pasted balsa, then put it on the hanging leather strop and shave with it. The signs look good. Fingers crossed.
The Venev, which is oddly labeled both as 2000 grit and 0-1 micron (The Shapton 16000 stone is labeled 0.92 microns, for comparison), polished like a 1 micron stone, but also left occasional rogue scratches. Whether those were due to some out-of-size particles, or merely particles that had broken out of the resin and stayed with the water on the stone and rolled around under the blade, I can't say. But either way, it wound up not being suitable.
The Nanohone 1 micron, which is an interesting soft matrix with holes in it, worked great. Any rocks breaking free of the matrix would have probably just fallen into one of those holes. So it polished the bevel up nicely, but if I raised my elbow enough to reach the bevel on the toe, those holes would make the illusion of stone flatness fall apart, and things would get caught. No.
What did the trick was a 15000 grit metallic bonded CBN stone. Metallic bond means stones aren't going to be breaking out of the bond, and the stone can be used without water, so no floating particles in a slurry. It's an Edge Pro-sized stone, 1"x6", so there wasn't much working room by the time you leave room for both my fingers and the honing guide on this large razor. But there was enough to get a some proper lines onto that problematic toe.
So I've moved on through the 0.5 micron diamond-pasted balsa strop, and the 0.25. Only the 0.1 remains. What things look like now is this:
The problematic toe, on the logo side of the razor.
No longer so problematic. I know there's still a band of shinier metal at the edge, and darker metal above that (speaking of the mircoscope picture; the darkness is just an artifact), but I know from observing the steps that the shiny part is 15000 grit CBN scratches, and the dark sliver is actually polish from the 0.25 micron pasted balsa strop. The edge feels, for the first time in the whole process, uniformly sharp along its whole length.
Other areas are more straightforwardly in good shape.
The toe on the other side.
A heel.
A middle area.
Tomorrow I expect to strop with the 0.1 micron pasted balsa, then put it on the hanging leather strop and shave with it. The signs look good. Fingers crossed.